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Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Portal

Zyxware Technologies developed the Sardar Patel portal in partnership with NVLI (National Virtual Library of India) and IIT Bombay (Indian Institute of Technology Bombay). The NVLI entity has been developed by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, under the National Mission on Libraries (NML) undertaking.

The aim of NVLI is to put together a digital collage of information of the entire Indian cultural heritage in the digital web world. Their main goal is to create, collect, encode and collate various digital assets related to Indian culture, in the form of a portal, and to allow relevant information access through web-based search.

The Sardar Patel website is a comprehensive study in the life of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, a key figure in the Indian freedom struggle from the British. Built on Drupal 8, the website has the ability to translate to different languages. It showcases information about Sardar Patel collected from various libraries. A timeline on the site along with interesting tidbits, quotes and a quiz tells us about the man popularly known as the ‘Iron Man of India.’ The digital assets of over 2000 content records can be viewed based on the theme or main events in his life.

The aim of the site is:

To allow easy access to digital information present in the form of books, texts, videos, audios, and similar content in multiple languages.

Collecting, combining and standardizing all available digital assets in an easily searchable form.

Ensuring preservation of history through digital content for the future generation.

Why Drupal?

The decision was influenced by the wide and growing government domain acceptance of Drupal. Drupal being Open Source and Free, the site is not tied down to any legacy systems and thus ensures the preservation of the digital content for the future generation.

In order to consolidate all the soft data available about Sardar under one centralized domain, the content had to be migrated from different sources. The Drupal platform enabled this along with a mobile–first user experience that reflects the evolving pace of innovation. The combination of tools that promote flexibility, the ability to translate to multiple languages, centralized CMS and editor independence also aided the choice of Drupal for this web space in Indian history.

Other needs that were met with this choice include:

Ease of use for non-technical content administrators

Cost effective

Secure and Scalable

The goal of the project was to build a scalable platform on the content management capability of Drupal by migrating the 2000+ content to Drupal.

Project Requirements

Responsive Theme

The site is custom designed and built from scratch taking into consideration the requirement specifications of the client. The site being in Drupal 8 is responsive while being user-friendly.

Content Migration

A key part of the project was migrating the 1 TB of data i.e over 2000 content files which included 1000 images, 800 textual content, audio and video recordings to be added as content for the site while keeping the site workflow simple and easy to navigate.

We were able to import content in bulk easing the migration process. This proved to be a real timesaver.

Digital Asset Management

To provide users with easily accessible information, the content on the site is sorted and arranged by the main events or themes as well as the chronological order of events based on the timeline of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.

Custom Search

The quintessential search capability of the site helps search the site for a given topic or name. It is also possible to narrow down the search options through filters using the faceted search.

Organizations involved:

Zyxware Technologies

IIT-Bombay, India

Ministry of Culture, India

Modules/Themes/Distributions:

Media entity

Search API

Solr Search

Paragraph

Translation Management

We have also released a distribution named Biolog with all features implemented in the portal, that can be used to built biography portals easily.

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:

The list above shows some of the Drupal 8 modules that were needed to support the platform. Entities and fields allowed for more flexibility. The translation management helped in the multilingual translation of the site to the Indian languages.

Result: Solid, Secure and Successful

The Sardar site was successfully deployed on time and within the budget. The site offers visitors a user-friendly navigation, greater usability and more robust search functions. On the backend, Drupal offers solid site security and easier use for non-technical administrators. The multilingual capability of Drupal 8 allows the site to have the content translated into Indian languages ( Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil, Bengali, and Marathi ) for use of indigenous people.

The prevalence of mobile usage especially among the young school and college going age group has been addressed with the responsive theme.